We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.

There could have never been two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison, no countenances so beloved. Now they were as strangers; nay, worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted. It was a perpetual estrangement.

...we were like two people standing apart on separate mountain peaks, recklessly leaning forward to throw stones at one another, unaware of the dangerous chasm that separated us.

We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.
I was a strong lad and survived; but the poison was in the wound, and the wound remained ever open

And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?

So young when the pain had begun Now forever afraid of being loved.

They knew that if they let each other go they were lost, but if they went on holding each other they were also lost. (p. 188)

Love was certainly not safe - not ever.

Was that really love? I saw all these passionate people reel about and drift haphazardly as if driven by a storm, the man filled with desire today, satiated on the morrow, loving fiercely and discarding brutally, sure of no affection and happy in no love...

Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon

Both looked back then on the wild revelry...and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude.

Alas! when passion is both meek and wild!

...the passion of love separated its victim terribly from everyone but the loved object.

"Love was a damaging mistake and its accomplice,hope, a treacherous illusion".